With a Whimper

Snow has closed the state highway.

On foot I lead a mob toward Keene,

twenty miles away. We’ve stifled

our normal human appetites.

Andy and Heather no longer crave

money, Jill no longer wants power,

Walter doesn’t mind being bald,

and Frank no longer frets that

he wasn’t born female. The day

sickens in a thousand shades of drab.

The highway’s hard to follow,

the landscape so muffled hardly

the roofs of houses show above

the petulance of snow. We dig

as we slog along, tumbling waist-deep

and devouring ourselves cell

by cell. The mist of body heat

rises in spongy gray. Daylight wanes.

The forest closes in. Now we know

we’re far off the highway. Trees block

the route, great limbs akimbo.

Walter wants to lie down and die.

Heather weeps and laughs at once,

her glass eye rolling. Andy,

Frank, and Jill want to return

to the village, but I remind them

we’re the only survivors, the reek

of rotten meat unbearable.

We backtrack far enough to find

a deserted house and dig out

the doorway. Inside we grope through

dark rooms and find a fireplace

and break up some dining room chairs

for fuel. We’ll huddle together

until our bones glow through our flesh

and the asphalt road reveals itself,

a thick black cancellation.

A Pair of Orange Pills

Every day a pair of orange pills

flushes through me to conquer

the runaway blood pressure

that otherwise would blind me

and render my kidneys useless.

I hate the smug little competence

of these pills, hate their efficient

control of my entire body.

I’d rather not go blind or lose

the knack of filtering toxins

from my blood, but wish the drug

companies didn’t grasp the dark

inside me, a place I never

expect to explore. The winter dark

roars in the hour before dawn.

It roars with a lonely grievance

only partly explained by wind

in hemlocks and jet airplanes far

overhead. It roars like the red

lion in the desert, roars below

the threshold of conscious behavior.

It roars in my bloodstream, explaining

the rage of pressure. To suppress

this entire half of the world

I take an orange pill as small

as buttons on a wood-elf’s coat.

Washing it down with orange juice

awakens me to the onrush

of daylight, stifling the roar

that like the sea in a seashell

existed only inside my ear.

The pills laugh inside me twice

a day, and believing in them

requires so much energy

that at night I sleep too deeply

to remember I’m supposed to die.